 I was reading a book about marketing on social media and I was surprised when the author basically said, you know, go on social media to be effective there. You need a clear understandable message. You need a compelling brand. And when I read that, I was like, wow. So it's assumed that we all somehow through some magical process come to a clear understandable message of our business, of our brand, and then it's just what stays like that. This reminds me of this idea about fixed versus growth mindset. I love this idea so much and I'm gonna apply it now to branding and messaging in your marketing. So a fixed mindset basically assumes that you start off with a fixed talent or intelligence. And, you know, when you take a test or try to learn something, if you do well, then it's a proof of your great intelligence or strengths or whatever. And if you do poorly on the test or if you try to learn a skill and it's hard for you, then your ego is, well, essentially it's a fixed ego. Your ego is hurt and you try to avoid taking such tests or learning such skills in the future because you don't want to, your ego doesn't want to come under attack that I'm not as smart as I thought it was or whatever. So that's the fixed mindset. The growth mindset says you can become much greater. I mean, you can become anything you want to be if you practice, if you gradually and patiently learn and try and practice, you can develop just about any skill that you put your time and energy into. That's the growth mindset. So how does the fixed and growth mindset apply to marketing and messaging? I guess, like I said, fixed mindset teaching says you better come to social media or an online presence with a clear understandable message and a compelling brand fully figured out. And I have never, even to this day, I feel like 12 years into my business, I'm just starting to come to a clear understandable message. 12 years of full-time business, 12 years. And I'm just starting to come to a clear understandable message. But all those 12 years, I've been earning a full-time income. So what does that mean? Yes, I'm telling you, even without a clear understandable message, even without a brand, I don't have a brand. Do you think I have a brand? It's not intentional. I certainly don't have a logo. I don't have a color scheme. I don't have a clear avatar, not really my avatar. My ideal client avatar keeps changing all the time. I'm like, forget it, I'm just gonna let it go. I don't have a brand. I never worked on it. I mean, I worked on it a little bit. Of course, throughout the years I've tried, but it just never was satisfying for me. I could never figure out what was exactly the deepest connection to my purpose, et cetera. So I just let it go. And yet, since year one, I've been making a good income. So I'm living proof that even in such a competitive industry as mine, which is marketing, I'm supposed to be, if anybody has a clear understandable message and a great brand, it should be the marketing expert, shouldn't it? I don't. So let me be proof for you that even without it, you can do really well financially. So growth mindset. So instead of, so please let go of this idea that you have to have a clear understandable message and a great brand. And then you put yourself out there, you create an amazing website and then people flock to you and work, let that go. If it's hard for you, if you don't have one, I mean, if you have one, then I start to worry that you have a fixed mindset in your marketing. So a fixed mindset is I gotta defend my message and my brand and this is who I am. It's fixed. So it doesn't, it's not flexible and supple and allow you, allow your messaging and brand isn't as flexible to your personal development as a growth mindset in marketing and branding. What is a growth mindset then? Growth mindset is, says this, we are continually clarifying our message based on our experiments and content based on putting out different offers to see what people are really resonating with. We're continually based on our conversations with our clients and colleagues and potential clients, et cetera. We are continually ever refining, getting deeper, broadening, expanding, maybe, you know, shortening our message. We're continually clarifying and never ends and then never has to end. It's just like, do you want your personal growth to end? Do you expect it at some point? I've grown up fully. I'm not gonna learn anymore. I'm not gonna grow anymore in love or wisdom or any other virtue. I'm done, I'm done growing. If someone says that, I would say, please go take a nap. Please go have a vacation because you're clearly exhausted. That's why you're done growing. But if when you're not exhausted, when you're fully resourced, when you've been well-fed, you're not hungry, you're not angry, you're not lonely, you're not tired, then you realize, wow, life is about the growth journey, about continued evolution and expansion of our understanding and the deepening of our understanding. So growth mindset in marketing in your messaging means, I don't have a message. I don't have a marketing message. I don't have a brand. I'm just continually clarifying it just through experiments. And so what do I mean by continual clarifying? Well, first, it's okay to just put something out there. Obviously you have to, if you're gonna create content or make an offer or have even a one-page website, you need to have something out there. You need to just say, this is my best guess for now. You don't have to say on your website. This is my best guess for now. What I do? No, no, just say blah, blah, blah, just state as if it's what it is. Knowing that you could change it tomorrow. That's the key. You could change it next week. And so the scary part, there are two reasons why, or there are, I guess there are three reasons why it's scary for you to have a growth mindset in marketing and for your brand. One is because you're scared of being judged. Maybe, right? You're scared of being judged by your friends, family, colleagues, oh, George just was that last week and now today is this. He's such a flake. And I had to deal with that. And in the beginning, and in the beginning especially, you change very fast in the beginning because you still don't know if you're gonna be this type of coach or that type of healer or this type of business or that type of service provider in the beginning. You're like changing almost every day or at least every month you're changing. What you're up to, what you're offering. Today I'm offering life coaching. Tomorrow I'm offering relationship counseling. The next day I'm a spiritual healer. The next day I'm a career consultant. Whatever, it's okay. Keep changing, keep changing and ignore the people calling you flake. My parents still to this day, 12 years later don't really know what I do because I kept changing so much in the beginning. They just like dropped it, right? My friends are kind of like, they kind of know what I do kind of, but I'm always open to change. So the ones who are calling you a flake, who the hell is calling you a flake by the way? Who are you afraid of in your head? Oh, I don't wanna become flaky to that person. Who is it? Because that person isn't your eventual audience. Your eventual true fans are in the thousands or in the hundreds of thousands. And that's gonna be several years from now. You'll have 10,000 followers or fans or clients or whatever. Today you may have 100 followers or friends at least. You may have 300 Facebook friends, most of whom can't even say what you do and they don't even care if you change every week. But for the 10 people who are judging you in your head, let it go because they're not your eventual fans. They're not. You are building your message for your fans three, five years from now. You're working on it for the future. Still, currently you can still get clients, of course. But don't worry about the ones judging you. So that's number one. Number two is you're afraid that if you don't get a clear understandable message and a great brand, then you might be wasting money in your website. You might be wasting time and money, right? Investing in your business. If you don't know what your brand is, your clear message is, what your offers are, who the hell you are, you're afraid of wasting money and time. Guess what? If you hire somebody to help you figure it out and invest in this great big website and invest in copywriting and graphic design and all that stuff, you're gonna be wasting. I can guarantee you, you'll be wasting more money that way. So let it go if you're not happy with your message and brand or not clear about it or whatever. You can let it go. You can let it go. I never invested much. Actually, I have, even last year, I invested a couple of thousand with a friend, in fact, in re-hauling my website and throughout the process, I'm like, no, I'm starting to feel that the fixed mindset is coming in again. So I let it go. I didn't even take the money back. That was a $2,000 mistake. And it's okay. It taught me again that I don't wanna get nailed down to a single message and branded. It was that kind of feel, very constricting kind of feel. And I don't need to. And maybe you don't as well. So don't spend the money and the dollars and the time and the energy like ossifying your brand, especially in the beginning. Maybe later on, you'll have so much more clarity and it's very obvious what people want to buy from you and where you make the most impact. And maybe at that point, you want to concretize it with a lot of investment into a great looking website. But at the beginning, certainly in the first couple years, let it go, let it go. You're wasting money and time, okay? What's more important is for you to be putting content out there, trying a bunch of different things to see what works, trying a bunch of offers. I'm gonna do life coaching here. I'm gonna do relationship counseling next week. I'm gonna do spiritual mentoring the next week after that. I'm gonna do health coaching the week after that. I'm gonna try it all. Now you might not do it literally one per week, but you can try one per month. It's fine. It's fine. Who says it's not fine? Tell me, please, let me debate them. Who says it's not fine? To change from life coach to health coach, to relationship counselor, to spiritual mentor, to software engineer, to whatever. I mean, you pick to arts and crafts, to jewelry maker, to every month. Why not? Especially in the beginning when you're exploring, why can't you explore? Who says you can't explore? Again, the 10 judges in your head, your mom or your old classmate or who the hell are judging you? Just say, sorry, I'm in my exploration phase and I will always be, by the way, just like George Cow's always in the exploration phase. So will I. So I'm sorry that it's not okay for you because you're used to the old school careers where you work for General Motors for 50 years doing this one career path. That's not this world. You are something different every month until you try enough things, make enough offers that you're like, oh, I really liked it when I was doing health coaching. Oh, I really liked it when I was counseling people on the relationships. Well, let me do more of that then. You have to try different things. So you don't have a clear understandable message just like I don't right now. You are continually refining, exploring, expanding, deepening, reordering the things that you talk about, you're continually refining. And so I was gonna say that the three problems were, okay, one is you're afraid of being judged as a flake. Two is you're afraid of wasting time and money, which I've said, you know, it's investing time and money in a strong brand and strong message, especially in the first couple of years you're wasting time. I can pretty much guarantee you because you're gonna want to shift, you're gonna want to change and what happens. You're gonna have what's called the sunk fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy. It's like, well, I've already invested so much in that website, I can't change now, which you have just limited yourself from exploring your true potential. Let it go, even if you invested a bunch, let it go, just like I did. I invested the 2,000, let it go, 2,500, I think. Just let it go, whatever, it's okay. Move on and explore, I'm not gonna let that time be down. Okay, and then the third reason why is that you feel like you must have, there's a whole industry now on purpose coaching, right? Purpose work, purpose coaching. And I do value it, but the place where I get worried about the purpose work, purpose coaching is again, the fixed mindset stuff. It's like, you're somehow supposed to do the purpose work and then come to your career purpose and go, that's my career purpose, that's it. For the rest of my life, who the fuck said that? I mean, didn't you, what, you can't explore anymore? You can't be something completely different now, by the way. Those of you who are purpose coaches, like, George, you're getting it all wrong. If I am, please comment below. That's not how it works, comment below, let me know, clarify for me. But basically, a lot of the common idea about purpose is like, I gotta figure out my purpose, put it into a message and a brand and a great-looking website, and voila, people flock to me and I feel so satisfied every day doing my purposeful work. Yeah, right? Isn't that what you thought it was supposed to be? Well, let me tell you, after 12 years of doing this, let me tell you, purpose is in every moment. I hope that you will detach your purpose from your brand. I said it, let me say it again. Detach your purpose, your career purpose from your brand and your marketing message and your offers. Let me say that a third time. Don't think that your service, your product, your brand, your website, don't require it to express the fullness of your purpose because that is impossible. The fullness of your purpose is far greater than any product, service, even career. You know what, I think, I'll tell you what I think the purpose of life is. I don't know if you agree with me on this. The purpose of life is to love and to grow and to grow in love. So is there an end to it? Is there like, I figured out my purpose? Well, what does it mean to grow? Well, that's up to you to explore and find out. What does it mean to love? That's also up to you to explore and find out and get deeper and deeper by the year. So for me, purpose is not in my brand or in my work or in my offers. No, I detach it from that. I'm like, my business is my business and my purpose is my purpose. No, sorry, it's not that way. My business is my business and my purpose is surrounding all of it. But my business is just one aspect of my larger purpose. Purpose happens in every moment. Before I came to this video, this sharing with you, I did my energy reboot, which reminded me again that the purpose for my life is to essentially connect more deeply, more truly in every moment with God. And for those of you who are offended by that word, I'm sorry, but whatever, you can use your own word. Actually, please tell me, are you offended by the word God? I've always been curious, like, does that somehow offend you too masculine to whatever? I don't think God is masculine, but whatever. So I think my purpose is to bring more of God into every moment of my day. And God represents joy, love, gracefulness, forgiveness, gratitude, joyful diligence, persistence, gentle persistence, growth, wisdom, to bring more of that into every day and to be a more aware of that every moment. Now that is a glorious purpose that I can really find meaningful every day. No matter if I'm doing life coaching or I'm doing bookkeeping or I'm doing arts and crafts or I'm cleaning up my computer desktop, all of it is purposeful work, not my brand and my, sure my brand and my message explore, it does express some aspect of my purpose, but it's far, far, it's tiny compared to the whole thing of purpose, which is in every moment. So don't get so caught up with having a clear understandable message. Just know that every day you're continuing to clarify it through your content offers you exploring. Let yourself experiment. I hope this is encouraging for you. Be well and thanks for joining me.